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Marty and Nick Jr. Go to America

I PAID my first visit to America in 1958, at the age of 9, and I liked it so much that I stayed for almost a year. Before we embarked on the Queen Elizabeth, my brother Philip (age 10) and I took the wise precaution of changing our names. For me it was quite straightforward: I would be known, stateside, as Marty. Philip was more imaginative, adapting one of his middle names and coming up with Nick Jr. — while boldly ignoring the fact that there was no Nick Sr. My middle name, I later realized, would have been perfect just as it was: Louis (my parents were admirers of Louis Armstrong). Anyway, when the great liner approached the glittering immensity of New York, Nick Jr. and Marty were fully prepared.

We came from Swansea, in South Wales. This was a city of such ethnic homogeneity that I was already stealing cash and smoking the odd cigarette before I met — or even saw — a person with black skin. My baptism by fire came in 1956, when my father took me along to visit an academic from what was then Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). On the way, as we rode the scarlet double-decker, he delivered a patient and, I thought, rather repetitive tutorial on what lay ahead of me.

“He’s got a black face,” he said. “He’s black.” And so on. I entered the little apartment — and immediately burst into tears. Nor did I mince my words: “You’ve got a black face!” “Of course I have,” said the visiting professor, when he had finished laughing. “I’m black!”

My father, in 1958, was also a visiting professor — he had come to teach creative writing at Princeton. By the time we started school at Valley Road, Nick Jr. had made my mother buy him his first pair of long trousers; Marty turned out to be the only human being in the entire establishment who was wearing shorts (plus Clark’s sandals and floppy gray socks). At Valley Road there were plenty of black pupils — though, as I recall, no black teachers; and at home I was soon on excellent terms with our cleaning lady, May, who drove over from Trenton two or three times a week in her sensational pink Cadillac.

In fourth grade I made friends first with Connie, then Marshal, then Dickie. After a while I became enamored of a black boy — called Marty. Marty wore his name with some panache (whereas, in my case, Marty had reverted to Mart, just as Nick Jr. had reverted to Phil). One day, using the come-on line favored by British children, I said to Marty:

So Marty came to tea, and it was, I thought, a complete success. Then I went to Marty’s. He lived in Princeton’s black neighborhood (which, I gather, is now largely Hispanic). And as I ate the evening meal with Marty’s large family, and played basketball in the back alley with his brothers and his friends, I most certainly noticed I was white, and with a physical intensity that I will never forget.

The only boy in the school wearing shorts: take that blushful isolation and multiply it by a thousand. This was my skin. And what I endured was a three-hour attack of self-consciousness so crushing that I feared I might faint dead away. And I later wondered: Was this how Marty felt at my house? Was this how Marty felt on Main Street?

In 1967 my father took another teaching job in America — “at Vanderbilt University at Nashville, Tennessee,” according to his “Memoirs,” “an institution known, unironically I suppose to some, as the Athens of the South.” Princeton started admitting black students in the mid-1940s. Two decades later my father asked if there were any “colored” students at Vanderbilt. “Certainly,” came the unsmiling reply. “He’s called Mr. Moore.”

Nor did the staff common room, in the department of the humanities, provide any kind of counterweight to the “values” of the surrounding society — i.e., the raw prejudices of the hog wallow and the gutter. The culprit in the following anecdote was a novelist and a teacher of literature called Prof. Walter Sullivan.

Whenever I tell this story, as I frequently do, I give him a Dixie chawbacon accent to make him sound even more horrible, but in fact he talked ordinary American-English with a rather attractive Southern lilt. Anyway, his words were (verbatim), “I can’t find it in my heart to give a Negro [pron. nigra] or a Jew an A.”

The strong likelihood of hearing such unopposed — indeed, widely applauded — sentiments at each and every social gathering moved my father to write that he considered his period in Nashville to be “second only to my army service as the one in my life I would least soon relive.”

All this happened a long time ago, and I can prove it. During that year in Princeton the Amis family — all six of us — went on a day trip to New York City. It was an episode of joy and wonder, and of such startling expense, that we talked about it, incredulously, for weeks, for months, for years. What with the train tickets, the taxi fares and ferry rides, the lavish lunch, the lavish dinner, and the innumerable snacks and treats, the Amises succeeded in spending no less than $100.

When he got back to the U.K. in 1967 my father wrote a longish poem about Nashville, which ends:

But in the South, nothing now or ever.

For black and white, no future.

None. Not here.

His despair, it transpired, was premature. One of the most marked demographic trends in contemporary America is the exodus of black families from the Northern states to the Southern. Nevertheless, those of us who believe in civil equality are suddenly in need of reassurance. I refer of course to the case of Trayvon Martin. Leave aside, for now, that masterpiece of legislation, Stand Your Ground (which pits the word of a killer against that of his eternally wordless victim), and answer this question. Is it possible, in 2012, to confess to the pursuit and murder of an unarmed white 17-year-old without automatically getting arrested? Ease my troubled mind, and tell me yes.

Martin Amis is the author, most recently, of “The Pregnant Widow” and the forthcoming “Lionel Asbo: State of England.”

A version of this op-ed appears in print on April 29, 2012, on page SR7 of the New York edition with the headline: Marty and Nick Jr. Go to America. Today's Paper|Subscribe